In the early 90s, there was a cycle movie monsters aimed at a more mature audience, kicked off by Coppola’s 1991 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (an underestimated film).
In 1994 alone, there were several major movie monsters: Neil Jordan’s Interview With a Vampire, adapted from the classic Anne Rice novel Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, and Wolf, which was based on an original story.
Mike Nichols’s Wolf is decidedly not a routine or a typical summer fare. This “romantic thriller” about a werewolf, framed as a contemporary tale of the supernatural, may appeal to youngsters, but it’s definitely not made with an eye on the youth market.
Grade: B (*** out of *****)
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Theatrical release poster
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More ambitious in intent than most mainstream movies released this year, Wolf provokes some genuine feelings and provocative thoughts, no minor feat in present-day Hollywood.
The hero, played by Jack Nicholson in a bravura performance, is Will Randall, a senior editor at a New York publishing house, haunted by fears of losing his job.
One winter night, while driving along a remote country road, he accidentally hits a wolf. Concerned that he’s killed it, he stops his car and follows the blood trail. The beast appears to be dead, but suddenly it bites him on the wrist and escapes into the woods.
From this fateful, mythical encounter, Will’s life begins to change and deteriorate.
The transformation is subtle at first, with his senses becoming more acute and his perceptions of those around him slightly sharper.
However, with each passing day, Will is drawn deeper into the mystical spirit of the wolf. Nothing–not his job, or marriage, or any part of his life–will ever be the same again.
Novelist Jim Harrison (Sundog, Legends of the Fall) claims that he has developed the idea for his friend Jack Nicholson, whom he admires as an actor.
Lycanthropy
The idea of Wolf had originated 15 years ago, when Harrison’s youngest daughter, Anna, challenged him to write something that would really frighten her. One night, sleeping in his cabin in Michigan’s peninsula, Harrison himself suffered what he calls a modest attack of lycanthropy (the delusion that one has become a wolf).
The Kafkaesque aspect of Wolf reportedly appealed to director Nichols, who sees it like Metamorphosis, a poetic expression of an inner state. It’s a metaphor for the experience of becoming different from everyone else and leaving humanity behind, which is a kind of nightmare that happens to people in the middle of their lives.
Male Menopause
on one level, Wolf is concerned with male menopause–professional and sexual anxieties that men experience in their mid-life crisis.
Inevitably, a film like Wolf assumes more particular meanings from the broader social context in which it is made, a time in which there are terrible diseases, and terrible things happen to people through circumstances no one can control. Some viewers may see Wolf as metaphor of AIDS.
The moviemakers have tried to eliminate value judgments as to whether Will is better off as a wolf–they imply that there are good wolves and bad wolves. In fact, initially, Will resists becoming a wolf, and it’s only the events of the story that make him unable to.
Wolf marks a reunion of Mike Nichols and Jack Nicholson, who have worked on three films before: Carnal Knowledge (1971), The Fortune (1975), and Heartburn (1986).
It’s impossible to imagine the movie without Nicholson, who has always been effective at showing the uncensored, uncontrolled, and darker side of his screen persona.
The movie offers a metaphoric character study of the male libido, a theme that Nichols had explored in Carnal Knowledge (for me, Nichols’ best film) in which Jack Nicholson was also the star. Except that in this picture, the man turns into an animal, literally, al the way down to his physique.
Most of Hollywood’s werewolf movies were made in the 1940s, when their sexual contents had to be cautious, due to the censorship of the Production Code, though the myth of the werewolf always had a sexual subtext. How else to explain the fact that the wolf tries to or tends to kill those he really loves and desires.
In this more explicit version, the love interest is played by Michele Pfeiffer, who engages in a bizarre, full of twists and turns, relationship with Will.
The New York City depicted in Wolf is literally and physically a site falling apart–the streets, the buildings, the pluming, the sewer system, the whole infrastructure are all in decay.
Production designer Bo Welch, who was in charge of the memorable fantasy worlds of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, Batman Returns, and Edward Scissorhands, created for Wolf the physical menaces and nightmares that surrounds Will’s existence.
But the film is not entirely pessimistic, suggesting that the times in which things are disintegrating may also be the times in which things might be changing, or calling for a change. Hence, issues of awakening, empowerment, and coming to close terms with the unconscious are central to the movie, both consciously and subconsciously.
Made by a middle-aged writer, director, and movie star, I’m curious to see how Wolf will perform at the box-office, in an industry dominated by young viewers.
The tale’s villain is a ruthlessly ambitious and immoral yuppie, played by James Spader in a type of role he has made his own for years. Spader had first burst into the movie scene in Soderbergh’s 1989 stunning debut, sex, lies & videotape.
The ideological subtext of Wolf may well signal the ultimate condemnation of yuppism as a lifestyle, and the conglomeration of our most creative institutions, including the publishing world, the milieu in which the movie is set.
The film was moderately successful at the box-office.
Cast
Jack Nicholson as Will Randall
Michelle Pfeiffer as Laura Alden
James Spader as Stewart Swinton
Kate Nelligan as Charlotte Skylar Randall
Richard Jenkins as Detective Sgt. Carl Bridger
Christopher Plummer as Raymond Alden
Eileen Atkins as Mary
David Hyde Pierce as Roy MacAllister
Om Puri as Dr. Vijav Alezais
Ron Rifkin as Doctor Ralph
Prunella Scales as Maude Waggins
Brian Markinson as Detective Kevin Wade
Peter Gerety as George
Bradford English as Keyes
Stewart J. Zully as Gary
Thomas F. Duffy as Tom
David Schwimmer as Cop
Allison Janney as Party Guest 2
Lia Chang as Desk Clerk
Jose Soto as Punk 1
Van Bailey as Punk 2
Dwayne McClary as Punk 3
Starletta DuPois as Victim’s Mother (one of the punks)
Credits:
Directed by Mike Nichols
Screenplay by Jim Harrison and Wesley Strick
Produced by Douglas Wick, Neal A. Machlis
Cinematography Giuseppe Rotunno
Edited by Sam O’Steen
Music by Ennio Morricone
Distributed by Columbia Pictures
Release date: June 17, 1994 (US)
Running time: 125 minutes
Budget $70 million
Box office $131 million
